Chapter 4 — What the Uniform Taught Me

Everything in me wanted to explode.

I stood in that yard with a fire in my chest that I had never felt in four years of combat, a rage so total it frightened me, and I wanted to turn it on the two well-fed, bejeweled women standing on the porch of a house my blood had paid for while my wife knelt starving in the mud behind it.

And I did not.

Because four years in uniform had taught me one lesson above all others, a lesson that had kept me and my men alive more than once: when the people in front of you are lying, and they do not yet know that you know, you do not tip your hand.

Rage is loud, and loud is useless.